Monday, 5 December 2016

The Future of Technology: Self-Driving Trucks

Long are gone the days when everyone wished to be a driver of any kind. The world was still evolving then and man was becoming sort of creative by the hour. With the ongoing changes in our daily lives, we even question whether man created God or God created man...but that's debatable.

Technology is what drives our current world, with speed, reliability, efficiency and a somehow trust that is developing faster than man-woman relationships.

Armies have drones that would do the work of 20,000 troops on the ground several years ago; medicine has machines that operate patients without the need of a doctor physically doing it; mobile phones have made the world a smaller place through communication, and so much more, all connected via the world wide web. An interesting piece of 'cloud' that man has no full idea of what exactly he created. That's not all. Google, Tesla and Otto are now working to make the world a "safer" place by building automated vehicles. God! This is just weird, right? Not at all. With all advancements in technology, what cannot be done?

Their idea is to have vehicles that will cause minimum harm to people by reducing accidents, increasing efficiency and of course lowering costs of production and maintenance. A brilliant idea of the century some may say...at what cost?

With driver-less vehicles, man and his fellow beings dedicate their lives to a machine, to do everything. The car will drive the people from place to place much better than a human driver would. Uber, one of the biggest Taxi companies taking control over the world is planning to have automated driver-less vehicles in the near future. Still, the same principles will apply.

Let's have a look at the downside of these self-driven vehicles:
a) Reduced employment.
- Drivers, who make a livelihood out of their professions, will end up jobless in the near future.
b) Possibility of failure, a potential risk.
- These machines are prone to failures, just as computers crash or get attacked by viruses, e.g. Airbus A380, Qantas flight 32, etc
c) Boring world
- Of course we all want these tech-stuff that will change the world, but it will be boring to sit and let a vehicle drive you without you doing the control, for those who love driving
d) Reduced creativity
- The new technology will limit creativity among people, especially those in the developed world. One would only modify a thing or two but not have the ability to create something new

There are so many reasons, these are just the few that can be mentioned.

Even with success of new technological self-driving vehicles, man still needs to be in control of the machine at hand. That's why there is an 'Auto-pilot' in most planes and still pilots seated in the cock pit.

"The greatest risk will be trusting a machine to completely handle 100% on itself, what humans could do at 99%."

Whether Google, Tesla, Otto, Uber or any other manufacturer takes a step to introduce the automated self-driven vehicles or not, man should consider his fellow being. Evolution cannot be stopped but making 20,000 or more people unemployed because of technology will only make the world worse than it is. Terrorism will grow, crime rates will increase, scarcity of certain needs of man will be witnessed, and we will equally be like the characters in the Maze Runner/Scorch Trials movie, with a man-eat-man world...